Deleuze and Diagram in the Architectural Point of View

Reference: Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, ‘Diagrams: Interactive Instruments in Operation’, in This Is Not Architecture: Media Constructions (London; New York: Routledge, 2002)

• Architecture still articulates its concepts, design decisions, and processes almost exclusively through posteriori rationalisations.
• The compulsive force of legitimising arguments still dominates contemporary debate,
• Since architecture – at least in the open, democratic, Western society in which we work – now results from a highly institutionalised, cooperative process in which clients, investors, users and technical consultants all take part, ➡︎ 이건 건축만은 아닐 것이다.
• The frustrating result is that there is hardly any real architectural theory to be found despite the diversity of practices at work today and despite a hugely expanded volume of architectural publications. There is only after-theory.

건축 스케치의 종류

• 버블 다이아그램 for relationship mapping (space and its function)
• Designing the outer form of the built environment
• figure ground (Black and white) for volumetric analysis

Architecture as a social discursive practice

• Looking into diagrammatic procedures is one way to partially open that door and dislocate the protective and constrictive barriers that architecture has raised to hide its vulnerable centre.
• a diagrammatic technique presents an opportunity to examine the social-discursive aspect of architectural practice from within.
  • 이것이 꼭 소셜 디스커시브인걸까? Relation discursive 가 될 수 있지 않을까?
• Their function is to regulate the production, consumption and distribution of texts within a particular field of interest. Discursive practices cannot very well be seen as separate from the social framework in which they take place,
  • 이 부분에서 주장이 조금 튼튼하지 않아보이는 것에 대해서 한번 써보는 것은 나쁘지 않을듯.
• The challenge for the next generation of architects is to acknowledge and analyse the internal discourse, which from a social- discursive viewpoint is far more comprehensive than the methodological process that is the basis of current design practice, and to find a theory of the real in that.
• There are different interpretations of the diagram, which occupy different positions on the sliding scale between subjectivity and objectivity.
• its imagery and the ways in which it instrumentalises concepts of organisation.3

Meaning of the diagram

• More to the point is the general understanding of the diagram as a statistical or schematic(개요 도식적인) image.
• In its most basic and historical definition, the diagram is understood as a visual tool designed to convey ‘as much information in five minutes as would require whole days to imprint on the memory’. ::4::
  • * J. Krausse, ‘Information at a Glance: On the History of the Diagram’, OASE(SUN Nijmegen, 1998). Krausse here quotes William Playfair, architect of the contemporary diagram, whose book The Commercial and Political Atlas(1786) introduced economic curve diagrams and bar charts.
• Diagrams are best known and understood as reductive machines for the compression of information.
• 최근 건축에서 다이아그램의 사용법
  • diagrams can also be used as proliferating machines.
  • thus transforming the diagram’s conventional significance.
  • For architecture,
  • The diagram conveys an unspoken essence, disconnected from an ideal or an ideology, that is random, intuitive, subjective, not bound to linear logic, and that can be physical, structural, spatial, or technical.
  • Architecture was encouraged by the writing of Gilles Deleuze, who described the virtual organisation of the diagram as an abstract machine.

들뢰즈의 압스트랙 머신

• Architecture similarly oscillates between the world of ideas and the physical world,
• Deleuze offers at least three versions of the diagram:
  • via Michel Foucault,
  • via Francis Bacon and
  • via Marcel Proust.
• 이들 사이의 차이점을 알아보고자 하는 거서이 아니다.
  • Instead of recognising three ‘versions’ of the diagram, we should instead speak of moods or tonalities, for what strikes us is that three deeply significant aspects of the diagram are conveyed in three very different modes.
  • 다른 스테이지들
    1. Associated with Foucault: how the figure of the diagram is not representational.
       1. Panopticon is ‘the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form … a figure of political technology’. ::5::
          1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
       2. It conveys the spatial organisation of a specific form of state power and discipline.
       3. cannot be reduced to a singular reading; ::like all diagrams, the Panopticon is a manifold.::
       4. Typically, when a diagram breeds new meanings, these are still directly related to its substance, its tangible manifestation.
       5. Critical readings of previous interpretations are not diagrammatic.
       6. a diagram is a diagram because it is stronger than its interpretations.
       7. Foucault introduced the notion of the diagram as an assemblage of situations, techniques and functionings made solid, he put the emphasis more on the strategies that form the diagram than on its actual format.
       8. For him, the diagram is interesting not as a paradigmatic example of a disciplinary technology, but as an abstract machine that ‘[makes no] distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content’. ::6::
          1. Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 141.
       9. ‘The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come.’ ::7::
          1. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (unpublished manuscript), p. 55. [Since the original publication of the present essay, this has been published (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).]
       10. it is about ‘the real that is yet to come’.
    2. Bacon: as we mentally take up the paintbrush, we simultaneously engage in an earthy lighthearted, playful debate about the selection and application of the diagram
    3. Proust, the interaction of time and matter is introduced, without which there can be no transformation. 여기서는 뮤지컬 턴,

Tools against typologies, 클리쉐와의 싸움

• 리프레젠테션 테크닉은 implies 우리가 컨셉츄얼 포지션에서 리얼리티에 집중하여 아이디어와 폼의 관계를 고정시키도록 한다. A representational technique implies that we converge on reality from a conceptual position and in that way fix the relationship between idea and form, between content and structure.
  • it cannot escape existing typologies 유형학, 표상 상징.
• An instrumentalising technique such as the diagram delays typological fixation.
  • How this is done is a trivial question for many techniques but a vital one for what we call an instrumentalising technique ➡︎ The role of the diagram is to delay typology and advance a design by bringing in external concepts in a specific shape as a figure, not as an image or sign. ➡︎ 베이컨?
    • ‘is a violent chaos in relation to figurative givens, but is a germ of rhythm in relation to the new order of painting’. ::8::
      • * Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 55.
    • 들뢰즈에 따르면 페인팅은 언제나 클리쉐와의 싸움을 마주한다. perpetual (영원한) fight
    • even the reactions against clichés are creating clichés.’ ::9::
      • Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 49.
  • The selection and application of a diagram has a certain directness.

Instrumentalising the diagram 기구화[도구화]하다

• 베이컨은 꼴라쥬를 통해 직접적으로 unmediated 클리쉐를 방해하지 않고 대신 instrumentalist effectuated 했다.
• At this point, the third meaning of the diagram, which confirms and facilitates the previous two, emerges: the triggering of the abstract machine. The abstract machine must be set in motion for the transformative process to begin,
  • 어떻게 다이아그램을 움직이게 하나? 어떻게 압스트랙 머신이 triggered되나?
    • Deleuze offers an indication by pointing at the novelistic treatment of time. Through Proust’s novel run, long lines of musicality, passion, pictoriality and other narrative lines that coil around lack roles within the story,
    • What exactly is the principle that effectuated the changes and, thus, formation that we find in real life and real-time? Furthermore, how can we isolate this principle and render it to the dimensions that make it possible to grasp and use at will?

Faciality: the operational dream.

이 글에서 어떻게 프루스트의 블랙홀을 건축학적 다이아그램에 적용시킬 수 있는가 질문한다.

One of our current projects is structured as a diagram of faciality.
Klein bottle

결론

• The abstract machine in motion is a discursive instrument;
  • It is both a product and a generator of dialogical actions that serve to bring forth new, unplanned, interactive meanings.
  • Discourse theory introduces the notion that meanings are not transferred from one agent to another but are constituted in the interaction between the two agents. Likewise, the architectural project is created in this intersubjective field.
• Diagrams, rich in meaning, full of potential movement, and loaded with structure, turn out to be located in a specific place after all.
• Understood as activators that help trigger constructions that are neither objective nor subjective, neither before-theory nor after-theory, neither conceptual nor opportunist,
• the location of the diagram is in the intersubjective, durational and operational fields, where meanings are formed and transformed interactively.